A second beta of KOffice-1.1 is now available. The improvements since the first beta are considerable, particularly in KWord. If you are looking for a stable and full-featured word processor under Linux, give it a try! This release also features improved filter support throughout the suite including better MS Word and MS Excel support, and a new Quatro Pro filter. You can read the full announcement on the KOffice web site.

OK. Thanx for nice job! It's getting better and better, however...
1) XFig import filter for KIllustrator does not work in all situations. This is quite important
for people who try to use graphs prepared using other tools.
2)Please, implement filters to/from DIA! I hope it's not a big deal.Currently to move diagrams from dia to killustrator i need to save them as EPS, then use "pstoedit" and save them as .fig file then ... well: xfig handles this, but killustrator looses a lot...
3)What about filters to other popular vector formats?
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4)According to KChart: drawings looks nice, but
it's uncomfortable to use: Maybe I cannot use it,
but currently I'm not able to draw "curve" made of points which X amd Y coords are in two columns. :-(
5)Kword: rightclicking on a frame should pop up some "properties" window... i.e.: clicking on picture frame one should be able to change file,
rotate picture, etc. (or maybe I do not understand the idea of frames). :-(
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Anyway: many, many KUDOs to KOffice team!

I wish some of the companies investing in KDE development would hire a good artist instead of another developer.

Of course, more and better development is always good, but there are quite a few great developers working on KDE/KOffice while there is a lack of artists to make outstanding icons.

I noticed this because the icons in KWord actually have improved since the last time I seriously played with it, but they are still not perfect.

This is one area where the big desktop environments (Win, Mac) still have an advantage over the free alternatives. No matter what you think of Microsoft or Apple from a technical or ethical point of view, you have to admit that whatever boots just looks gorgeous.

Most 32x32 icons under KDE look very nice as well, but the 22x22 toolbar icons are usually not so beautiful. :-(

Please people, if you know your way with Krayon, The Gimp or Photoshop or a similar application, read artist.kde.org and submit to icons@kde.org!

>I wish some of the companies investing in KDE development would hire a good artist...<

IIRC tackat works for SuSe, and I don't know about qwertz. They are excellent artists.
I have never seen better mimetypes icons on any OS, even not on Mac.

> No matter what you think of Microsoft or Apple from a technical or ethical point of view, you have to admit that whatever boots just looks gorgeous.<

Microsoft Windows 95 & 98 icons are terrible, icons are very nice in Windows 2000, and Apple MacOSX icons are excellent (though not those on MacOSX dock bar - they are inconsistent). I don't agree that whatever boots there is just gorgeous.

>Most 32x32 icons under KDE look very nice as well, but the 22x22 toolbar icons are usually not so beautiful. :-( <

Hm, 22x22 icons can not be 'beautiful'. If you want to make them nicer they have to be very simbolic and have to have only a few contrasting colours IMHO. Creating icons is not so simple as people might think, especially not the whole set of icons. 'Problem' with KDE is that it, fortunatelly, has too many icons. There are, for example, 50-60 (or more) actions icons which come in 16x16, 22x22 and 32x32 sizes. So, just for a set of actions icons you have to create about 180 icons. And they have to be consistent in look & feel.

But, that is also the main problem why more people don't work on kde icons. I can not only create different icons for Konqueror, because some of Konquerors icons appear in Kmail (but only some of them) and some of them in Kedit, and some of them in Kword etc. So I have to create also toolbar icons for almost all kde applications. In my opinion that should be changed, so Konqueror has its own icons, Kmail has its own icons etc. Otherwise, if I create only icons for Konqueror and not for Kmail etc. my icons in Kmail etc. will be inconsistent.
We can only expect that artists would like to create icons for one kde application but not for all of them. Very few people have so much time.

> I can not only create different icons for
> Konqueror, because some of Konquerors icons > appear in Kmail (but only some of them) and
> some of them in Kedit, and some of them in
> Kword etc.

That's wrong.
If you install your icons into $KDEDIR/share/apps/konqueror/icons/...
you can make your icons appear in konqueror _only_. :-) It's just not possible to install such "iconskins" using a GUI yet.

Wauu, that's great. I didn't know that. Is it possible to do the same thing for all kde apps?
IIRC there is not Icons folder in $KDEDIR/share/apps/kmail for example. Anyway, I'll be back at home on Sunday and work, work :)
Thanks, Tackat.

Yes! This is the way the iconloader works.
Did I already mention that the iconloader is very flexible ;) ?

> IIRC there is not Icons folder in
> $KDEDIR/share/apps/kmail for example.

Create one. And the rest of the directory-structure like in $KDEDIR/share/icons. Should work. While it was made on one hand this way to avoid name-clashes it can be used on the other hand to create icon-skins. Smart, heh? ;)

The problem with them, in most cases, is that they have too many bright colors. I have no problems with Konqueror, but in KOffice, the buttons are distracting, Icons are something Microsoft got right: they used a mundane pallet toolbar-wide, and still managed to get high-quality, obvious and symbolic icons

I have no problem with KOffice icons. Are we talking about same KOffice? I run one from cvs, and when you have icons set to 16x16 or 22x22 they are not dictracting. Only if you set toolbar icons to 32x32 some of them are distracting because they have different size (and that's because they are not finished yet). In KOffice beta1 (and probably beta2)
icons are OK (at least 16x16 & 22x22 ones).
Problem with previous versions of KOffice was that when you run it you got by default too many toolbars opened, and IIRC there were too many colourful icons, but not now.
Try to open too many toolbars in Microsoft word and you'll get the same result, you wont be able to see what is what.
Another thing, you forget that we all used Microsoft Word for a long time and we learned icons position on the toolbar.
KOffice toolbars have another good feature (all kde toolbars):
you can use text instead of icons on some (or all) toolbars., and what is most important you can contribute and create some nice high-quality, obvious and symbolic icons :)

Is there any chance we can hope to see a MS Word _export_ filter or a WordPerfect import and export filter in the near future? This would be really great to see, and would make it a lot easier to share documents with 93% (or so) of the office world that uses MS or Corel office suites...

I don't know, I guess reverse enginering, or something like that? Now that OpenOffice is out there, I suspect that new data could also be gleamed from there - I sure wish they would at least... KWord has potential, but I still don't see how it can be truly useful in a world that mainly uses MS Word, if it can't save to MS Word format.

Ah yes, welcome to Microsoft, home of the moving target Word format. I'm fairly sure that even subminor revisions of their suite (i.e. x.x.x) involve a total redo of the file format, or at least enough changes to make it difficult for people to reverse engineer file formats. Perhaps the U.S. gvmt should have dis-monopolized M$ the quick way and forced them to OSS bazaar-style all their protocols and file formats. :-)

MSFT's file formats aren't proprietary, nor is reverse engineering them illegal. If you go to either site, you'll see OLE2 docs, docs on the DOC format, etc...

wvWare and Abi both have really good support for importing DOC. I'm trying to add support for exporting to DOC inside of wvWare right now, though. If anyone from the KWord development team is reading this and would like to collaborate on making something like this a reality, I'd really appreciate it. I'd hate to see a duplication of effort on this sort of scale when it could so easily be avoided.

It is obvious to me that AbiWord is striving for the best DOC import quality, and features are slowly coming in. KWord seems to be the opposite, features and capabilities are priority, DOC import secondary.

Frankly, what are you doing using a document "standard" that the company that created it cannot even get right?!?!?! E.g., ever try MS Word for Mac? And, even worse, how about MS Excel for Mac? Case closed.

If you want to have your documents last 20 years, use LaTeX or SGML. There is a great front-end for them called LyX (http://www.lyx.org). Better yet, you'll find yourself not wasting productivity on fonts and other BS, and writing your document, letting it do all the formatting details (table of contents/figures/tables, margin notes, indicies, footnotes, etc...). I've been using it for close to 3 years now, where I produce 90% of my technical documentation and presentations (built-in PDF export).

I still use Abi for DOC import (and then cut'n paste into Linux), or for quick, non-technical . I'm evaluating KWord for desktop publishing, where LyX won't do (so far, so nice!). I _hate_ word processors, cried when Lotus killed AmiPro and Adobe killed the FrameMaker beta for Linux.

LyX uses wvWare to convert DOC->LaTeX, which LyX then imports. Abi also uses wvWare, but in a different way. Writing a direct LyX output filter for wvWare, for example, should be trivial if someone wants to step up and do the work (I personally have no interest, but will add others' code to the tree). Figure out how to email me.

Yeah, that works - at least there is finally some kind of document type that Word users can read that KWord supports... however, I'm pretty sure RTF does not support clip art, etc. in it, right? I suppose it is at least a step in the right direction, and I can't complain about that. :-)

Hi Kyle,
Thanks for the suggestion. I use WP8 right now, and it actually does support Word and WordPerfect format. Between that and StarOffice, there is support for Word doc's in Linux - although KOffice has a much nicer interface than the other office suites.

At least KOffice is one step closer to the other office suites, now that it has RTF support...

It is actually possible to get KWord to save files you can send to your Windows friends. Use Print to File to get a PostScript version of the doc, then use the ps2pdf program to convert it into a PDF. Everyone can read those blighters - even if they don't want to!

(Actually - is there support for people to Export Postscript and PDF documents in the file menu. A PDF export option would look pretty funky - you could always grey out the PDF option if ps2pdf wasn't installed on the system).